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Saturday, January 05, 2008

There Won't Be A Review Of Amazing Spider-Man 545

I considered it, even "wrote" a guest review for it. (The guest would have been Shakespeare, and any of you who've read your Bard like you should have would know what the quote would have been.) But really, what's the point? Everything that can possibly be said about "One More Day" has been said already, and nobody who wasn't listening before is going to listen now. The ultimate arbiter of history will be the length of Joe Quesada's tenure as EIC, the reception of "Brand New Day" by the fans, and how well Marvel can stick to the new publishing schedule for ASM. (I'm not putting any money on it.)

So screw it. I've said for the last two years that I'd walk the second they undid the marriage, and that's what I'm doing. If they don't feel like making Spider-Man comics for people who like the idea of Peter Parker growing up, so be it. I've got twenty years of stories that say otherwise. I've got David Michelinie and J.M. DeMatties's early nineties runs. I've got Amazing 259, the story that cemented in my mind the certainty that MJ is the one for Peter. I've got the Essentials, and the wedding album. I've got DeZago and 'Ringo's Sensational. I've got Jim Butcher's wonderful novel The Darkest Hours, and Peter David's "Five Minutes," and Adam-Troy Castro's Sinister Six trilogy. I've got Marvel Adventures, and the movies (is there any doubt Peter and MJ end up together in the end there?), and the first four years of Stracynski's run (MJ's a powerful force in the book, even when she's not in it), and Tom Beland's "I Heart Marvel" one-shot. In the immediate sense, I've got Chris Bennet's new novel Drowned In Thunder, set before editorial stuck its grubby fingers into JMS's work, which says in a single paragraph what Quesada's been willfully ignoring for two decades.

This, too, shall pass. If Marvel decides to dispense with this nonsense and get back to telling stories instead of acting out midlife crises, I'll come back. If not, well, I'll console myself with the fact that, no matter how much they try to retcon it away, the truth is spelled out in large, friendly letters on the cover of what has quietly been the best Spider-Man book they've been publishing for the last two years.

Amen, brother. Since the whole point of Ultimate Spider-man was to give the fans a young, unmarried Peter Parker, I'm left wondering what the purpose of One More Day was. I guess just to give a swift kick to the jimmies to everyone who's been reading ASM for the last 20 years. Or, at least, another one. As if "Sins Past" wasn't bad enough.

Actually, I don't know it'll be undone soon. I can always hope, and I don't think it'll be permanent any more than the last two failed tries were, but like I said, the longevity mostly depends on Joe Quesada's tenure at Marvel and how the sales turn out. We'll see in a month or so, I guess.